Ethnicity, Mestizaje, and Writing

Ana Ma. Manzanas

Univesidad de Castilla-La Mancha

Racism, like colonialism, presumably integrates the other (read the Native American,
the African American, the Mexican American, among the possibilities), within a new order in
which each particular group is given a new identity which confirms its marginal position. This
is a suitable argument to support what I sustain in the hyphenate identity issue. The new citizens
are named after their ancestry generation and this way they are forced to carry that burden of
difference.
The contact zoneRolando Hinojosa points out, no one group can live and work in
proximity to another without developing some cultural as well as some psychological bonds.
(11)
The liquid border between us
So far we have argued that ethnicity is socially and culturally constructed, something
reinvented and reinterpreted as Sollors argues in The Invention of Ethnicity (xi).
One of the most recent and influential articulations of race is Anzaldas the new
mestiza in Borderlands. La Frontera. Echoing Jos Vasconcelos, a Mexican philosopher, Gloria
Anzalda argues for the emergence of a 5th race, a hybrid race, una raza mestiza, una mezcla de
razas afines, una raza de color la primera raza sntesis del globo (qtd. In Anzalda 77).
Anticipating the alleged inferiority and degradation of the racially hybrid, Anzalda makes clear
that this mixture of races, rather than resulting in an inferior being provides hybrid progeny, a

mutable, more malleable species with a rich gene pool (77). The mestiza consciousness which
emerges from this crossing exists not on the essentialist territories encompassed by the border
but on that kind of interstitial, hyphenate space where polarities dissolve and where univocal
identities are challenged, the borderlands. Existing on the borderlands the mestiza consciousness
transgresses the politics and the division of the border to create and produce a new space, a new
discourse and a new culture which accepts and welcomes hybridity as part of its very being.(36
Ana)
In fact it seems possible to apply Anzaldas formulation of the mestiza consciousness to
the articulation of a mestiza literature. The crossing and cross fertilization, as well as the
inclusiveness implicit in the emergence of the mestiza consciousness are also essential
components of literature which crosses borders, and accepts the rich literary gene pool it draws
from as well as the cultural presences within the individual. This vision of literature as mestiza
affects not only the writing of the so called mestizo/a as it validates Dereck Walcotts tenet that
maturity is the assimilation of the features of every ancestor (513), but also the works of the so
called racially and culturally pure. For them, like the hybrids, maturity is also assimilation,
amalgamation and mestizaje, a bi- or multiculturalism which works in multiple directions and
draws on the simultaneity of times and presences. Just as a mestiza consciousness hybridizes and
challenges the existence of the purity of blood, an inclusive mestiza literature questions the
existence of a pure literature. The mestiza literature accepts the existence of a contact zone,
of transculturation and amalgamation, and revises the tenets of what has been traditionally
considered pure literature. (39 Ana)